Who holds the Martyn's Law duty in a managed or tenanted pub?
It is the first question a multi-site operator should settle, and the one most often got wrong. Getting it wrong means either preparing for premises that are not yours to prepare, or assuming somebody else is handling premises that are.
The duty follows control of the premises, not ownership of the freehold. In a managed house the operating company controls the premises and holds the duty. In a tenanted or leased house the licensee running the business usually does. A pub company with a mixed estate therefore holds the duty on part of its portfolio and not on the rest.
Why control is the test, not ownership
The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 puts the obligation on the person responsible for the premises, meaning whoever has control of them in connection with their use. That is a practical test about who runs the place day to day, not a property test about whose name is on the title.
It is the same logic that decides who holds the premises licence, and in most cases the answer lands in the same place. If you are unsure, the question worth asking is simple: who decides what happens in that building on a Friday night?
How it falls across common structures
| Structure | Usually holds the duty | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Managed house | The operating company | The company employs the staff, sets the procedures and runs the site. |
| Tenanted or leased | The licensee | The tenant runs the business and controls the premises. The pubco is a landlord. |
| Franchise | Usually the franchisee | Depends how much operational control the agreement leaves with them. Read the agreement. |
| Management agreement | Usually the operator | Where an owner hands day-to-day running to a third party, control moves with it. |
| Hotel with function rooms | The hotel operator | Even where an organiser hires the room, the operator normally retains control of the premises. |
| Concession in a larger venue | Often the host venue | The host usually controls the wider premises and the capacity that puts it in scope. |
What this means for a mixed estate
Most sizeable UK pub companies run both models. In practice that produces three separate jobs, and they are not interchangeable:
- Managed sites. The duty is yours. You need documented procedures, trained staff and evidence, and you carry the penalty if it is not there.
- Tenanted sites. The duty is the licensee's. You are not liable, but a tenant who gets this wrong is still your problem commercially, and most pubcos already support tenants on licensing and health and safety.
- Sites you are not sure about. Establish which category each falls into before spring 2027, in writing. This is the cheapest work on the list and the easiest to leave undone.
Supporting tenants is a choice, not an obligation. Several operators will make it anyway, for the same reason they run tenant training on other regulation: a tenant fined £10,000 is a tenant with a problem.
Does the 200 threshold apply per site or across the estate?
Per site. The test is whether it is reasonable to expect 200 or more individuals to be present at the same time at those premises, from time to time. A group of forty pubs where only nine cross 200 has nine premises in scope, not forty.
The phrase doing the work is "from time to time". A site whose ordinary Tuesday is fifty people may still be in scope if it fills for a match, a wedding or New Year's Eve. Capacity on the busiest reasonable occasion is the number that counts, not the weekly average.
What to do about it
- List every site and mark it managed, tenanted, franchised or other.
- For each, record the busiest reasonable occupancy rather than the average.
- Name a responsible person for every site where the duty is yours.
- Decide, deliberately, whether you are supporting tenanted sites or leaving it with them, and tell them which.
The estate view on the home page takes those three numbers, being sites, managed to tenanted split, and how many cross 200, then draws the duty surface they produce: how many premises are yours, how many responsible persons you must name, and what the aggregate penalty exposure comes to.
This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice. Structures vary and agreements differ; where a site is genuinely borderline, the agreement and a solicitor will settle it better than a web page.
Primary sources: the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, the Home Office statutory guidance published April 2026, and ProtectUK, which is run by the Home Office, NaCTSO and Counter Terrorism Policing and is free to use.
Written by Abdul Khalique, who builds Musterlog, which keeps the record of what each site has actually done. If you have settled the question above and now need to prove the answer across a whole estate, that is the part we do.